Modern consumer electronics, such as smart phones, personal digital assistants, and location based services devices, as well as enterprise electronics, such as servers and storage arrays, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever shrinking physical space with expectations for decreasing cost. Every new generation of integrated circuits with increased operating frequency, performance and the higher level of large-scale integration have underscored the need for back-end integrated circuit manufacturing to provide more solutions involving the integrated circuit itself.
Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these requirements. Some of the research and development strategies focus on new package technologies while others focus on improving the existing and mature package technologies. Both approaches may include additional processing of the integrated circuits to better match the targeted package.
The continued emphasis in the integrated circuit technology is to create improved performance integrated circuit devices at competitive prices. This emphasis over the years has resulted in increasing miniaturization of integrated circuit devices, made possible by continued advances of integrated circuit processes and materials in combination with new and sophisticated device designs.
Numerous integrated circuit designs are aimed for mixed-signal designs by incorporating analog functions. One of the major challenges in the creation of analog processing circuitry (using digital processing procedures and equipment) is that a number of the components that are used for analog circuitry are large in size and are therefore not readily integrated into integrated circuits. The main components that offer a challenge in this respect are capacitors and inductors, since both these components are, for typical analog processing circuits, of considerable size. In response to the demands for improved package performance and analog circuitry integration, packaging manufacturers may prepare the integrated circuit for packaging as well as provide analog circuitry integration onto the integrated circuit.
Although analog circuitry integration and processing support the miniaturization trend, other problems arise from this integration. For example, semiconductor or integrated circuit devices have pads exposed for connecting, such as wire bonding, to the package terminals, such as leads. Typically, analog circuitry integration or any additional device processing after the pad development damages the pad resulting in poor electrical contact, contact reliability, reduced yield, and increased cost.
Still thinner, smaller, and lighter package designs and mounting/connecting configurations have been adopted in response to continuing requirements for further miniaturization. At the same time, users are demanding integrated circuit packages that are more reliable under increasingly severe operating conditions.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit package system providing low cost manufacturing and improved yield for the integrated circuits. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.